Sustainable fashion design is like Tetris in the sense that it is all about fit–fitting shapes as tightly as possible to a given space. Designers desire to avoid fabric waste during the cutting stage to reduce the effects it has on the environment. To aid this, MIT, the University of Washington, and Adobe researchers designed and introduced WasteBanned, a tool that designs and emulates garments with minimum wastage. It assists in drawing, designing, and developing environmentally sustainable clothing prototypes without using any materials or fabric to create waste. Their work was exhibited during the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.
“Zero waste design can be a really hard puzzle, but it’s rewarding to solve it,” says former CSAIL postdoc, Adobe research scientist, and senior author Mackenize Leake.
“Garments look really simple, but once you cut one piece, you’re also modifying others. This intertwined process called linked editing, requires creativity, and WasteBanned is a fun, interactive tool that helps you visualize these changes before you begin to cut. We’d love to see more people design in this more environmentally friendly, resourceful way.”
WasteBanned takes apparel design from a “design-driven” perspective to a “material-driven” approach where dressed fabric takes precedence over style or design. The tool shows 2D-panel shapes and gives the final touch, showing the 3D garment. Users feed fabric dimensions in order to virtually cut, sew, transport, quantify, and encode panels. Panels can be divided, trimmed or altered to form designs; this may consist of the three-piece skirt appearance or the 13-piece sweatshirt. The app allows erasure, undo, or redo, something real-life slicing cannot afford to do as it is irreversible. Parameters that can be set when planning include utilizing no waste or restrictions on the type of cuts to be used. Amendments made in the 2D visualization are shown on a digital figure; the ‘simulate’ button turns the image into 3D.
Through an experiment, the researchers gave WasteBanned to six participants, some with experience in designing and sewing. Examining how the participants perceived how easy it was to use the system, all of them found it easy and interesting to use. A fashion student went further and produced a real pink floral bell sleeve tunic from the design she had created on the application.
“Participants had various backgrounds,” says lead author and Flex software engineer Ruowang Zhang MEng. “Their consensus was that WasteBanned was very interesting and easy to use. They also observed how it increases sustainability—something notably contrary to the design processes you see in fast fashion.”
To improve its ‘materials-first’ design tool, Zhang and Leake would like users to select equivalent-length seam curves for aesthetic and well-fitting garments. They also hope to create a personalized constraint solver for curved cuts and variable seam lengths.
“Creating more sustainable forms of product manufacturing requires methods that prioritize material and ecological constraints at the start of the design process,” says Jennifer Jacobs, Assistant Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who wasn’t involved in the paper.
“WasteBanned is exciting in this respect because the authors apply computational constraints to the material-first approach of zero-waste clothing design, which can potentially lower barriers to using zero-waste techniques in garment design overall.”
“This work rethinks the process of apparel design neatly: The idea that you will use up all the fabric is built in from the start, and the system only lets you design garments that can be made without throwing anything away,” says Steve Marschner, Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, who wasn’t involved in the research.
“This simplifies the process but makes it much trickier at the same time. You can only change the shape of one piece if you change the one on the other side of the cut line, and then you also have to change other pieces that get sewn to those, and it gets complicated fast.”
“WasteBanned solves the constraints continuously, letting the designer easily explore the possibilities that will work without worrying about all the possibilities that won’t. Reducing waste in the garment industry is a big deal because of the incredible volume of fabric that is used, and addressing head-on the inherent relationship between design and efficiency is a great thing to see.”
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